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Thus much established, we may return on our path: we have to
discuss the seat of the passionate element in the human being.
Pleasures and pains- the conditions, that is, not the perception
of them- and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the body
as a determined thing, the body brought, in some sense, to life:
are we entitled to say the same of the nascent stage of passion?
Are we to consider passion in all its forms as vested in the
determined body or in something belonging to it, for instance in
the heart or the bile necessarily taking condition within a body
not dead? Or are we to think that just as that which bestows the
vestige of the soul is a distinct entity, so we may reason in
this case- the passionate element being one distinct thing,
itself, and not deriving from any passionate or percipient
faculty?
Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal,
pervades the entire body, so that pain and pleasure and nascent
desire for the satisfaction of need are present all over it-
there is possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which,
however, it may suffice to assign to the organs by which it is
executed- but in general the region about the liver may be taken
to be the starting point of desire, since it is the main acting
point of the vegetal principle which transmits the vestige phase
of the soul to the liver and body- the seat, because the spring.
But in this other case, of passion, we have to settle what it is,
what form of soul it represents: does it act by communicating a
lower phase of itself to the regions round the heart, or is it
set in motion by the higher soul-phase impinging upon the
Conjoint [the animate-total], or is there, in such conditions no
question of soul-phase, but simply passion itself producing the
act or state of [for example] anger?
Evidently the first point for enquiry is what passion is.
Now we all know that we feel anger not only over our own bodily
suffering, but also over the conduct of others, as when some of
our associates act against our right and due, and in general over
any unseemly conduct. It is at once evident that anger implies
some subject capable of sensation and of judgement: and this
consideration suffices to show that the vegetal nature is not its
source, that we must look for its origin elsewhere.
On the other hand, anger follows closely upon bodily states;
people in whom the blood and the bile are intensely active are as
quick to anger as those of cool blood and no bile are slow;
animals grow angry though they pay attention to no outside
combinations except where they recognize physical danger; all
this forces us again to place the seat of anger in the strictly
corporeal element, the principle by which the animal organism is
held together. Similarly, that anger or its first stirring
depends upon the condition of the body follows from the
consideration that the same people are more irritable ill than
well, fasting than after food: it would seem that the bile and
the blood, acting as vehicles of life, produce these emotions.
Our conclusion [reconciling with these corporeal facts the
psychic or mental element indicated] will identify, first, some
suffering in the body answered by a movement in the blood or in
the bile: sensation ensues and the soul, brought by means of the
representative faculty to partake in the condition of the
affected body, is directed towards the cause of the pain: the
reasoning soul, in turn, from its place above the phase not
inbound with body-acts in its own mode when the breach of order
has become manifest to it: it calls in the alliance of that ready
passionate faculty which is the natural combatant of the evil
disclosed.
Thus anger has two phases; there is firstly that which, rising
apart from all process of reasoning, draws reason to itself by
the medium of the imaging faculty, and secondly that which,
rising in reason, touches finally upon the specific principle of
the emotion. Both these depend upon the existence of that
principle of vegetal life and generation by which the body
becomes an organism aware of pleasure and pain: this principle it
was that made the body a thing of bile and bitterness, and thus
it leads the indwelling soul-phase to corresponding states-
churlish and angry under stress of environment- so that being
wronged itself, it tries, as we may put it, to return the wrong
upon its surroundings, and bring them to the same condition.
That this soul-vestige, which determines the movements of passion
is of one essence [con-substantial] with the other is evident
from the consideration that those of us less avid of corporeal
pleasures, especially those that wholly repudiate the body, are
the least prone to anger and to all experiences not rising from
reason.
That this vegetal principle, underlying anger, should be present
in trees and yet passion be lacking in them cannot surprise us
since they are not subject to the movements of blood and bile. If
the occasions of anger presented themselves where there is no
power of sensation there could be no more than a physical
ebullition with something approaching to resentment [an
unconscious reaction]; where sensation exists there is at once
something more; the recognition of wrong and of the necessary
defence carries with it the intentional act.
But the division of the unreasoning phase of the soul into a
desiring faculty and a passionate faculty- the first identical
with the vegetal principle, the second being a lower phase of it
acting upon the blood or bile or upon the entire living organism-
such a division would not give us a true opposition, for the two
would stand in the relation of earlier phase to derivative.
This difficulty is reasonably met by considering that both
faculties are derivatives and making the division apply to them
in so far as they are new productions from a common source; for
the division applies to movements of desire as such, not to the
essence from which they rise.
That essence is not, of its own nature, desire; it is, however,
the force which by consolidating itself with the active
manifestation proceeding from it makes the desire a completed
thing. And that derivative which culminates in passion may not
unreasonably be thought of as a vestige-phase lodged about the
heart, since the heart is not the seat of the soul, but merely
the centre to that portion of the blood which is concerned in the
movements of passion.
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